Tag: Mr. Mercedes

First of all can I just say that I’m so done with listening to older guys getting way too into awkward sex scenes when narrating audiobooks… I wasn’t that great of a fan of the narrator in the first place and after that it just got really painful. Will Patton drawled his way through this and while it was okay most of the time, sometimes he just completely lost the plot and irritated me with the way he portrayed certain characters. I’m also sure that the book was 100% longer than it needed to be because he insisted on maintaining a snail’s pace… but that’s up for debate.

Moving on… I’m a big King fan, but I’m not blind to his faults. Hey, everyone has them, so who am I to judge right? I know he’s a great writer and most of the time I absolutely adore his work, but honestly this isn’t the first time I didn’t love something he did. I’m not sure if this is true, because even though I’m a fan I haven’t read all his work, but I think this is the first time he’s tackled the crime thriller genre; and yeah I’m going to vote that he gives it up and sticks to horror… although I’m willing to stick it out for the rest of this series.

The characters felt recycled and thin, trying too hard to be either liked or hated. Hodges is supposed to be one of the best detectives his county had, but throughout this book he does the stupidest things and flagrantly disregards the law in multiple instances. Yet he’s kind of forced down your throat as the good guy, the one you’re rooting for. I mean if he was just any other old Joe who was flirting with thoughts of ending it after retiring and realizing that he created his whole existence around his work and is now nothing without it… so yeah okay maybe he needed this “case” to save himself. But I still don’t think his actions were corresponding to the person we’re told he is…

Brady Hartfield is your run of the mill “bad guy”. He’s impossibly hateful and mostly insane, but also super smart and lucky. He blames everyone but himself for his actions as well as the repercussions and his mommy issues are sometimes cringeworthy but mostly it’s recycled psycho stuff. Said mommy probably had a lot to do with how he turned out though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she also had a nest of snakes in her brain because damn she was screwed up…

In the supporting cast nobody felt genuine or even original (except maybe Holly… she was refreshingly crazy). The plot itself was patchy and needed too many excuses to be even a little bit believable. Most of the time Hodges takes things for granted, doesn’t make obvious connections and just generally mucks things up even more than they already are. Honestly, without his “supporting characters” he probably wouldn’t have gotten far at all and Brady would have gotten his wish…

Having said all that, this was still enjoyable enough to keep me listening, and King’s writing is always uniquely riveting. I’ll give the series another chance and pick up Finders Keepers next, although I don’t have much hope of character improvement…